Doing the info-dump shuffle

I've got going on my rewrite of Darius in the last two weeks, and it's going well.  But starting at what was book two of a series means I have the problem of working in some of the information that formed the subject of the first book.

I've been surprised  by how easily I've been able to work in some pieces of information, but other pieces have given me a headache.

My first question was to ask how much of that information I really needed.  The answer was quite a lot.  The new novel starts with my  coder character Jian solar sailing.  Someone tries to kill her out there, and that naturally leads to a consideration of likely suspects. This is where the backstory comes in.

There are three possible suspects, but just telling the reader about them would leave them scratching their heads and asking 'So what?'.  That information only becomes relevant when the reader knows how - and why - these people interacted with Jian in the past  And that's where the backstory comes in.

When I wrote fhe first chapter of this re-vamped novel I was keen to make it clear that the starship who is talking to Jian is fully sentient.  So I included a page long info-dump (on page two of chapter one), with all that background detailed.  You'd think that, after all the years I've been writing, and all the things I've learned about my craft, that I would know better than that.

So I went back to chapter one and I took out nearly all of that information.  But I still needed it somewhere close to the start of the novel.  It's necessary for the reader to make sense of the relationship between Chilai and Jian.  The solution was to move an edited chunk of that detail back into chapter two, and put it into Chilai's viewpoint.  Now I have the ship thinking about how Jian helped her to attain full sentience.  Chilai loves her creator, and it's down to her to save Jian's life.

That makes much better sense, and the information now carries the emotional charge of Chilai's feelings.  Sometimes we do need to dump information on the reader.  But it's also worth taking a long, hard look at your manuscript and seeing if you can shuffle that information around, break it up, or edit it to fit in the perfect place in the manuscript.